Recently, in all kinds of industrial worlds such as food industry and manufacturing industry, demands for strengthening safety and management systems of products have been heightened, and therewith, the amount of information on the products are increasing. However, the current information on a product is just information such as a country of manufacture, a manufacturer, or an item number, mainly provided by ten and several figures of a barcode, and the amount of information is quite small. Further, in the case of using a barcode, scanning the barcodes by hand one by one requires long time. Consequently, instead of the barcode system, an automatic recognition technique by a non-contact IC tag utilizing an electromagnetic wave, which is called RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), has been attracting attention.
In addition, in order to ensure safety (for example, a place of origin, absence or presence of infectious disease, and the like) of animals and plants, a system is becoming common, in which IC chips are directly implanted into bodies of the animals and plants to obtain and manage information on the animals and plants by an information reading device (reader) outside the bodies (Reference 1: Nikkei Electronics (Nikkei Business Publications, Inc.) published on Nov. 18, 2002, pp. 67-76).